What Do We Owe the Victims of the Past?

Leora Batnitzky
Assistant Professor of Religion
Princeton University

What is owed to the victims of the past and who owes it? As we all know, questions about restitution to victims of the Holocaust remain with us. In the short time allotted me today, I would like to explore briefly connections between economic and moral restitution and relate them also to questions of forgiveness and expiation. Finally, I would like to reflect, again very briefly, on the moral significance of these issues for those of us who neither experienced nor participated in the crimes of the Nazi genocide.

I cannot do justice today to the question of how the Nazi genocide may or may not fit into our picture of the nature of good and evil. I suggest, however, that we can only begin to think about what the victims and the families of the victims are owed by thinking about a vice that is at once completely ordinary and completely devastating. This is the human vice of cruelty. The attempted genocide of the Jewish people could be viewed as a case study of the extremes of cruelty. The late political theorist Judith Shklar defines cruelty as "deliberate and persistent humiliation, so that the victim can eventually trust neither himself nor anyone else."¹ How is it possible to repair such deliberate and persistent humiliation, and perhaps more difficult, to restore a victim’s trust in himself and in others?²

First, it is necessary to understand the depths of Nazi cruelty. In a reflection connected to the title of his famous memoir The Sunflower, Simon Wiesenthal expresses the lingering horror of Nazi cruelty. Wiesenthal relates an experience he had while marching as a prisoner in a Nazi labor camp. He writes:

Our column suddenly came to a halt at a crossroads.

I could see nothing that might be holding us up but I noticed on the left of the street there was a military cemetery….The wires were threaded through sparse bushes and low shrubs, but between them you could see the graves aligned in stiff rows.

And on each grave there was planted a sunflower, as straight as a soldier on parade.

I stared spellbound. The flower heads seemed to absorb the sun’s rays like mirrors and draw them down in the darkness of the ground as my gaze wandered from the sunflower to the grave. …butterflies fluttered from flower to flower. Were they carrying messages from grave to grave? Were they whispering something to each flower to pass on to the soldier below? …

Suddenly I envied the dead soldiers. Each had a sunflower to connect him with the living world, and butterflies to visit his grave. For me there would be no sunflower. I would be buried in a mass-grave, where corpses would be piled on top of me. No sunflower would ever bring light into my darkness, and no butterflies would dance above my dreadful tomb.³

The Nazis took from their Jewish victims not only their lives but their deaths also. Murder violates not just the victim’s right to life but the victim’s right to a natural death. But the Nazis were not ordinary murderers. The Nazis attempted both to murder their victims and to erase their memory from the face of the earth. Wiesenthal’s reflection brings into focus not only the Nazi attempt to murder the Jewish people, but the cruel attempt to destroy their memory—their connection to their past—along with the world’s memory of them. It is a connection to a past, both to their own past and to the world’s memory of its past, and not material gain, that victims and their families seek from restitution.

Once we consider, even as inadequately as I have just done, the loss inflicted upon and experienced by the victims of the Holocaust, it becomes clear how ludicrous and morally offensive is the notion that economic restitution is actual compensation for Nazi crimes. Economic restitution is not compensation nor can it buy forgiveness or even introduce that possibility. Absolution from guilt clearly cannot be bought or sold. Furthermore, it is only for the victims of the Holocaust, the large majority of whom were murdered, to forgive their murderers. However, when accompanied by moral restitution, economic restitution can be an act of repentance. As both the Jewish and Christian traditions insist, true acts of repentance are ones that do not expect forgiveness in return. True acts of repentance are those whose only end is repentance itself.

But what does it mean to make moral restitution? Does moral restitution amount simply to an apology? Furthermore, who is responsible for making moral restitution? This last question is especially important, since as we move into the twenty-first century, we are moving into an era in which neither persecutor nor victim will remain. In a very real sense, then, moral responsibility for the legacy of the Holocaust becomes increasingly our own.

To even begin to broach these questions, we must return again to the most heinous aspect of the Nazi crime: the attempt to destroy not only the present and the future of the Jewish people but their past and the world’s memory of their past also. It is this connection to a past, and our responsibility to answer for that past, that not only defines human decency and responsibility, but also constitutes our very identities. As the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre writes:

I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point. This is in part what gives my life its own moral particularity.⁴

Every individual benefits in some way from his/her historical and cultural inheritance. Because each and every individual benefits in some way from being part of a nation or group, each and every individual must also answer for the past deeds of that nation or group.

Many Christian and Jewish thinkers have historically been uncomfortable with some of what the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old Testament, has to say on the issue of responsibility for the past and the debt we owe to the past. I am referring in particular to Exodus 34: 6-7 where we read a description of a vengeful God:

The LORD! The LORD! A God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; yet He does not remit all punishment, but visits the iniquity of parents upon children and children’s children, upon the third and fourth generations.⁵

The conception of inherited guilt expressed in this text does not mitigate but rather gives greater moral significance to our own actions. Just as individuals benefit for generations to come from the good deeds and accomplishments of their ancestors, so too individuals must bear the burden of their ancestors’ sins. The biblical text recognizes a fundamental moral truth of the human condition: there are indeed some deeds that are so horrible that their effects are felt for many generations. All of us owe a debt to the past, both for what is good in, and for what is wrong with, our world. To make moral restitution for the past is to recognize and acknowledge this debt. Once again, in MacIntyre’s words, "I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself off from that past…is to deform my present relationships."⁶

But does this analysis of the basic features of human identity imply that all third parties—all those who do not fall directly into the categories of victim or persecutor—are equally responsible for the Holocaust? Certainly not. Debts are as particular as crimes. The historical beneficiaries of those who benefited, whether militarily or economically, from Nazi crimes owe particular debts connected to the particular legacies of their nation’s past. I do suggest, however, that we Americans, while not the historical beneficiaries of Nazi crimes, also owe a particular debt to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive as well as to incorporate that memory into our national identity.

As we move into the twenty-first century, it is essential that we take a broader view of history in which we recognize that the boundaries of history are not so firmly drawn. The Holocaust is part of our history not only because there are so many American citizens of Jewish and European descent, but also because our own history, and hence our present identities, have been and are shaped by the Holocaust. The American nation is implicated in the legacy of the Holocaust, both for better and for worse, both for what we did do, and for what we did not do, to counter the Nazi genocide. Furthermore, the Holocaust reminds us that democracy must be guarded preciously; sadly, we must remain ever vigilant to the fact that we are no less susceptible than Weimar Germany was to antidemocratic dangers.⁷

Is moral restitution simply a matter of adopting a particular attitude? I need not remind anyone that attitudes, and words, can be cheap. It is here that the material aspect of restitution once again becomes relevant. For the European nations and their descendents, and for the Jewish victims and their families, economic restitution is a material link to a past that has been forever destroyed. In America, our obligation to the past must take material form also. Material reminders of the Holocaust, such as memorials, museums, and first and foremost Holocaust education, allow us not only to remember the past, but also to shape our present and future identities as democratic citizens of both America and the world.⁸

NOTES

¹Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 37. See also Shklar’s suggestion for thinking about the relation between cruelty and victimhood: "For all our wealth of historical experience, we do not know how to think about victimhood. Almost everything one might say would be unfair, self-serving, undignified, untrue, self-deluding, contradictory, or dangerous….no history, however, attentive to the evidence and however discriminating, can tell us how to think about victimhood. Putting cruelty first is only an incentive to do so" (p. 22).

²Primo Levi, an Italian-Jewish Holocaust survivor, describes the Nazi cruelty toward the Jews as "useless violence…occasionally having a purpose, yet always redundant, always disproportionate to the purpose itself" ("Useless Violence" in The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1988), p. 106). The cruel humiliation of useless violence destroys the victims trust in his or herself as well as in everyone else. Jean Améry, a survivor who, like Levi, eventually killed himself, writes: "Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured….Anyone who has suffered torture never again will be able to be at ease in the world…Faith in humanity, already cracked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again" (At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (New York: Schocken, 1986), p. 29.

³Simon Wiesenthal,The Sunflower, with a Symposium (London: W.H. Allen, 1970), pp. 19-20.

⁴Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory 2^nd edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 220. One need not endorse MacIntyre’s communitarian outlook to recognize the validity of this particular point.

⁵As translated in Tanakh (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985). See also Exodus 20:5-6 for a similar description of God in the context of the Ten Commandments.

⁶After Virtue, p. 221.

⁷It is not a coincidence that many of those Americans who hold antidemocratic views also deny the Holocaust. For a broad overview of some of the political backdrop to Holocaust denial see Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Penguin Books, 1994).

⁸I would like to thank Lawrie Balfour, Mark Larrimore, Robert Lebeau, Jeffrey Stout, and Froma Zeitlin for their comments on and suggestions for this paper.